Review Catch-up

gga

I’ve been falling very far behind on my book reviews. I have actually
been reading, I just haven’t been reviewing. And, well, once the
backlog of books gets more than about four high it’s pretty hard to
write proper reviews.

I’m cheating. I’m going to catch up by writing short reviews of all
the books I’ve read in the last six months or so. And from there I
should be able write real reviews for books again.

Without further ado, here’s six months worth of books in three
sentences, or less.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Ian Fleming. Part of the book
club, I wanted to get a feel for actual Ian Fleming Bond books, before
reading Faulks’. Fun, enjoyable, if you can avoid hurling the book
across the room in the first 20 pages out of frustration over the
blatant misogyny. I managed - just - and found it got better.

Devil May Care, Sebastian Faulks. The actual book club book - a
Bond story, set in the ’60s, but written just last year by Faulks, in
the style of Ian Fleming. Less misogynistic and generally offensive,
but a lot less enjoyable. I frequently got bored and would put the
book down, forgetting to pick it up again for a little while.

The Road, Cormac McCarthy. Another book club book - this one was
brilliant, some thought it was depressing, but I found it
uplifting. The ash and the grey bleakness practically leaches onto
your fingers out of the page, which is nothing on the handful of
images in this book that you will probably never forget. It’s a
fantastic book, but be warned.

The End of Mr Y, Scarlett Thomas. A potential contender for most
pretentious book I’ve ever read, possibly even beating Virginia
Woolf’s Orlando, but don’t let that
put you off, it’s actually pretty good. It a tour through literary
criticism and modern physics with a significant dash of metaphysics
tossed in - it felt inspired by
Pynchon. Quite
original though, and recommended.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn. Another book club book - chosen because, well, he’d
just died. An absolutely great book, and a deserved classic, I have
essentially no complaints and instruct you all to read it - it’s
short, funny and a very easy read. However, apparently this book
inspired many in the west to embrace communism, and that I just can’t
see.

A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess. A book club companion book,
for One Day In the Life…, chosen because it was a banned book, and
coincidentally it features a lot of Slavic inspired slang, without any
explanation - which was actually surprisingly cool. Unfortunately, I
haven’t seen the famous movie. The book was a good, but a little weak.

Seize the Day, Saul Bellow. Because of all the short books, I
went for another companion book - this one was a ‘day in the life’
story. Fellow book clubbers felt that our last two books (The Road
and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) were very depressing -
but this, this is depressing. Every single character is deeply
detestable, not just in nature and behaviour but also in past: this is
a book to attack your opinion of your life and make you doubt
everything. Be warned.

Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein. A monster sci-fi
classic from the golden age of science fiction, regarded as serious,
deep and important. Also, utterly hilarious, and quite irritating. The
funny comes from Heinlein’s sexism: he simply could not conceive of
any kind of female equality that wasn’t some kind of weird submissive
promiscuouity. That and the long discourses on various aspects of
science are also very irritating: please don’t put incidental
exposition in dialogue, it’s trite.

Twilight, Stephenie Meyer. Book club again - vampire chick-lit
was the required genre and this hit it. Very readable, but I was
hoping that something would happen. I guess I was never a teenage
girl.

The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman. Excellent: just the right line
between a fun story and something that felt just a little darker and
deeper. It’s a re-writing of Kipling’s The Jungle Book, though this
is subtle. While it is a ‘young adult’ novel, read it and enjoy it, a
very good book.

Odd and the Frost Giants, Neil Gaiman. A very short $2.50 novel
that I read in 45 minutes. Cute.

The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides. Wow, one of the best
books I’ve read in a very, very long time. It’s different, it draws
you in, you become part of the story; in a very engaging way. Shortly
after reading I saw the movie: and also wow, a very faithful to the
spirit rendering.

Still Life, Louise Penny. Wow, one of
the worst books I’ve ever read. Seriously, this is absolutely
abysmal. Murder-mystery in genre, but pure rubbish in execution. All
the way through the book I had to keep putting it down to avoid the
hurl-across-the-room feeling. For example, first chapter identifies
the murder victim; second chapter goes back in time a couple of days,
to the victim talking to a friend in a café, she reveals that
she saw a crime. And then without any pretense, the description the
crime is skipped. I mean, come on! Gee, do you think that could have
something to do with her death? But then, in a few pages you find out
what happened anyway. And! In the end, that crime has nothing to do
with the murder. Christ. After this and The Blind
Assassin Canadian literature is
dead to me. Oh, and this was a book club book as well.

Altered Carbon, Richard Morgan. A tip: if you read something
really bad, read something light that you know you’ll enjoy very
quickly afterwards or your brain will start to tell you that the hours
you have to put into a book are a bad investment. This was a good
counter: a really cool sci-fi noir story. Most interestingly, this was
a novel centred around a highly socially disruptive technology, but
in the window before the tech becomes ubiquitous and available to
all. That window is interesting. There are also some Banks-ian
characters, without quite the same detail in the characterisation,
please read if you like sci-fi.

Pomegranate Soup, Marsha Mehran. Again, thanks to the book club,
this was a simple story, and just plain nice. It wasn’t particularly
well written, there wasn’t a great deal that happened and the
characterisation was just plain atrocious, but in the end I enjoyed
reading it and I found the story was… nice. Apart from the
transparently good vs evil characters, a major criticism is the lack
of direction: there are frequent, unexpected changes in direction. She
almost redeems herself with a glimpse into the past of the main
villain, but it just doesn’t seem to go anywhere. Still, … nice.

And the funny thing about all that? It seems to be much easier to
write something about bad books than good books. That would say
something the reviewer, I think. I shall work on that.